Resetting the Conversation

I’ve spent fifteen years watching disaster management systems strain under the weight of events they weren’t built for — and wondering whether anyone else noticed the same patterns I did.

Earlier this month, I published Strategic Disaster Coordination: The Missing Architecture of Disaster Management. It’s an attempt to put structure around something I’ve been wrestling with for years: the idea that we don’t actually have a system designed to manage disasters. We have a system designed for emergencies, and when disasters occur, we scale it up and hope it holds.

Much of modern emergency management was built rapidly in the years following September 11th. In that process, we leaned heavily on first responder models — tools designed for discrete incidents, clear boundaries, and short operational timelines — and extended them into environments defined by scale, complexity, and prolonged disruption. Using ICS for strategic disaster coordination is a bit like using a fire engine’s radio system to coordinate the rebuilding of a city’s electrical grid. The radio works fine. It’s just not the most effective tool for the job.

The result is a system that often struggles not because of the people in it, but because of the architecture underneath them.

The book lays out that argument and introduces Strategic Disaster Coordination as a starting point for thinking about what’s been missing: an architecture for managing consequences across systems, organizations, and time — rather than trying to command or control them from a single point.

But it is intentionally not a finished product.

I’m calling it Edition Zero — a first draft meant to be read, challenged, and improved. If SDC argues that disaster management should be built more like an open-source network than a command hierarchy, it felt wrong to publish the framework any other way. It’s a foundation for conversation, not a final answer.

An Open Invitation

If the book argues anything, it’s that disaster management is not something any one organization or level of government can solve alone.

So this is an open invitation. If you’ve worked in disasters, lived through one, studied them, or thought about them from a different angle, I hope you’ll engage with these ideas. Agree, disagree, add context. Some of what I’ll be writing challenges how we currently operate, and I think that conversation is overdue — but it only works if more than one voice is in it.

The goal isn’t a perfect framework. It’s something more honest, more effective, and more aligned with the reality of disasters as they actually happen.

More to come.